Tilco Striker

Metadata

Title: Tilco Striker

Date:
2000andafter

Region: Ontario

City/Town: Peterborough

Filmmaker: Matthew Hayes

Matthew Hayes
2014/2min 47sec

The short film created by Matthew Hayes, is the story of women workers in a Peterborough, Ontario plastics factory who unionized and struck in the mid-1960s against management harassment and low wages. The strike also led to an infamous injunction against the strikers, while highlighting the problems of a labour movement dominated by men but with increasing numbers of women in its ranks.

“The Tilco affair is the story of this second tier of women workers whose desperate struggle to unionize a factory of just less than 60 employees in a small-town Ontario city sparked a malestrom of wider labour protest, led to the state’s successful criminal court cases against 26 other workers after their support picket, and eventually spawned a Royal Commission on labour disputes, itself a storm of controversy, chaired by Justice Ivan Rand, one of the initial legal architects of the Fordist compromise. This “woman’s” strike, ultimately defeated by a small-town cowboy capitalist employer, provides a fascinating, intricate narrative well worth telling for its own sake. The wider battle over injunctions which emerged from the strike, including the state’s royal commission, serve as a useful prism through which to view labour-capital relations in this period.”

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